Johnny McGibbon is a member of Sinn Fein and serves on theCraigavon Borough Council in County Armagh. He flew to St. Louison Wednesday morning. He is the future of Northern Ireland. He is21 and does not remember the Troubles.

"My earliest memory of all of that is the cease-fire of '94," hetold me. By then, the real fury had wound down, but the officialend to the fighting came with the Good Friday Accords of 1998.

To understand the significance of somebody from Northern Irelandnot remembering the Troubles, you have to understand that theconflict has been going on for almost 500 years, ever since KingHenry VIII of England embraced the Protestant reformation andtried to pacify his Roman Catholic subjects in Ireland byplanting 150,000 Protestant Scots in the northern province ofUlster.

When the Irish achieved independence in 1921, Ulster was splitoff from the rest of the country. The Republican movement soughtto unify Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland. The heartof the movement was its military wing, the Irish Republican Army.Its political wing was Sinn Fein.

The most recent fighting began in the late '60s when theCatholics of Northern Ireland began demonstrating for civilrights and their demonstrations were met with counter-demonstrations. There were riots. In January 1972, Britishsoldiers shot 26 people during a march in Derry. Thirteen died onwhat was called Bloody Sunday.

Irish-Americans funneled a lot of money to the Republicanmovement. Much of the money was gathered by the Irish NorthernAid Society. With the conflict over and a unity government inplace, the society has turned to education. It sponsoredMcGibbon's trip to the states. He's been talking to groups aboutthe state of affairs in Northern Ireland today. I had lunch withhim at Seamus McDaniel's in Dogtown.

And what is the state of affairs? Very good, very positive, hesaid. The Republican movement still favors eventual unificationand things are moving in that direction, McGibbon said. When doyou think it might happen? I wouldn't put a timetable on it, hesaid, but it is happening.

I thought about another lunch at Seamus McDaniel's in 1999. GerryKelly was in town. He was more IRA than Sinn Fein. He had beenarrested in London in 1973 for trying to bomb Scotland Yard. Hewas given two life sentences but escaped from the prison afterserving 10 years and wound up in Holland. The Dutch agreed he wasa soldier rather than a criminal and agreed to extradite him onlywhen the British agreed to forget his original sentence andcharge him only with escape. So he did another five years.

When we had lunch eight years ago, Kelly had just been to SouthAfrica. He said that Nelson Mandela and the African NationalCongress were the role models for the Republican movement. Theynegotiated a transfer of power and they didn't seek vengeance ontheir one-time oppressors, he explained.

I was in Northern Ireland a couple of months ago. I met withRaymond McCartney in Derry. He is a Sinn Fein member of the newnational assembly. He is a former IRA man who did 15 years inprison for two murders. His convictions were eventuallyoverturned. He was a hunger striker in prison, and there is alarge mural of him in Derry. He was just back from a conferencein South Africa when I saw him. The South African government isup and running. Still a role model.

I saw Kelly at a party in Belfast. He is now second in command onthe Republican side in the new government.

Perhaps the most interesting man I met was a man in Derry who hadbeen high up in the IRA command structure. He was never arrested,and he has remained largely anonymous. He could have come fromCentral Casting.

"A lot of people died, and I'm sorry about that, but change comesfrom a gun," he said. He talked about people he knew who were"too decent." Yet Matt Morrison, a former IRA man who now livesin St. Louis and who gave me introductions to his old colleagues,told me that the man was one of the early proponents of apolitical solution. When most IRA men were skeptical about SinnFein, he promoted it. It's the future, he had said.

Now the future is here. The Republicans and Sinn Fein seem tohave history on their side. I asked McGibbon if he had heard ofthe man from Derry. He looked blank for a minute, and then hesaid, "It sort of rings a bell," but I had the idea he was justbeing polite.